Mel Gibson Biography

He was born Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson in Peekskill, upstate
New York, the sixth child of 11. When he was 12, his father won
$21,000 on Jeopardy, combined it with a workman's compensation
settlement, and moved the family to Australia to keep his boys
out of the Vietnam War draft. Coming of age in the land-down-under,
Gibson became a heavy drinker by 16, not to mention a smoker, scrapper
and ne'er-do-well.

Without him knowing, his sister, Mary, sent an application on
his behalf to the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts
in Sydney. Gibson was invited to audition, was accepted, and traded
his job at an orange juice factory for an acting career that would
eventually make him one of the most recognized and respected actors
in the world.

However, he continued to drink and brawl and wound up in a hospital
with a broken nose and jaw in 1979. A week later and still swollen,
he auditioned for Mad Max and landed the role partly because
of his messed up face. He went on to play a diverse range of
characters, including Hamlet, William Wallace in Braveheart
(which he also directed), and the cocky detective, Martin Riggs
in the Lethal Weapon series.

The world knows Mel Gibson as an actor, director, winner of two
Academy Awards and The Sexiest Man Alive, according to a People
Magazine poll in 1996. He has also won three Australian Film Institute awards, two Blockbuster Entertainment awards for Favorite Actor, Four People's Choice Awards for Favorite Motion Picture Actor and a Golden Globe for Best Director of Braveheart.

His friends know him as a prankster, conservative thinker, self-deprecating
humourist and staunch Roman Catholic opposed to birth control
and abortion. (Gibson has seven kids with his wife of 17 years, Robyn).
Alcoholics Anonymous know him as someone struggling to control
his drinking and live one-day-at-a-time since joining in 1990.

"My biggest weakness is that I'm excessive," he says.
"Fortunately for everyone concerned, I'm not as excessive
as I used to be."

Gibson has no truck with feminists and he is not a favorite of theirs
either. He believes that women are not equal, just different.
He believes in capital punishment as well as the right to bear
arms. He encourages his kids to run around the woods and "kill"
each other with paint balls. He brags that his six-year-old is
a "regular killing machine." As for his opinion of former president
Bill Clinton, he characterizes him as a "low level opportunist."

On the softer side, Gibson is an opera buff and an aficionado
of Beethoven. His fellow actors can't say enough about him as
a colleague who cares about everyone's performance. Having won an Academy Award® for Best Director for his work on Braveheart, several years later, Gibson took on another project close to his heart. The Passion is the story of Jesus Christ, and has been the center of much controversy, due to the fact that Gibson, who is directing the film but not playing an acting role in it, claims the entire film will be in a foreign language, without subtitles and in addition, various religious groups have been protesting and/or praising the film.